Tuesday, January 02, 2007

More On Global Warming's Moron

Al Gore.

Will he ever get over losing that election? (I can't wait for the libs to start their gyrations over his "losing" that election. Why is it that courts can legislate lefty causes, but are all screwed up when interpreting the law about a presidential election? Why, lefties?)

A sampling of recent issues of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, shows that peer-reviewed studies dispute virtually all the tenets behind climate alarmism. A November 17 feature, "False Alarm: Atlantic Conveyor Belt Hasn't Slowed Down After All," rebuts the hyped hypothesis that melting ice from global warming (read: man-made global warming) would disrupt ocean currents and plunge Europe into an Ice Age...

For instance, rapid rises in sea level produced by global warming is another popular alarm, one very relevant for residents of the Texas Gulf Coast area. But as the November 24 issue of Sciencesays, "It remains unclear whether the recent rate increase [since 1993] reflects an acceleration in sea-level rise or a natural fluctuation."

Indeed, sea level has been rising for well over a century for the same natural reasons that brought the end of a little ice age. What scientists are measuring and debating concerns not feet but inches, and fractions thereof, over many decades. This hardly seems the crisis scenario that Al Gore portrays...

Exaggerated forecasts of disrupted ocean circulation, rapid sea-level rise, and more intense hurricanes make for splashy headlines, but sober science suggests that these scares du jour may go the way of yesterday's alarms over global cooling, the population bomb, and mineral-resource exhaustion.

So what do these ecological doomsday-seers really want?

Nonetheless, one part of these scare stories is genuinely frightening: the heavy-handed government intervention that advocates always look to as the source of salvation. Yesterday's foes of the free market were socialists, communists, and Keynesians. Today's are greens who want government engineering to "stabilize" the climate and ensure "sustainability."

Those sound like laudable goals, but the devil is in the details. Extensive government control, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism are in the details. Don't believe me? Ask Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace.

5 comments:

mike
said...

Hi Darren - long time, first time. As a high school science teacher in SoCal, I appreciate your stance on global warming. I've been skeptical of human influence for some time, and I always appreciate links to articles that take a logical approach to the problem.

But have you never noticed that with liberals, whatever the crisis du jour is, it's always the end of the world? First, it's overpopulation, then it's radioactivity, then we're all starving, then we're suddenly all obese, pick your fashionable liberal crisis, and it's always the end of the world.

Did these peoples' parents never read Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf to them?

I've toyed with the idea of an Internet Museum of Failed Crises but there've been so many down through the years. Not that lefties have a monopoly on looming crises but that their crises always require immediate governmental action, generally with a concomitant reduction in individual liberty.

The weakness of the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming has been dealt with at length elsewhere but a handy measure of the weakness of the case is the preference by greenies for the democratic approach, as though scientific validity is decided by consensus. It doesn't take a deep knowledge of the history of science to put the lie to that view and that's what the greenies are counting on; that too few people have even that level of understanding of science.

But I don't think they'll pull it off and I believe the greenies share my opinion which explains the rising pitch and diminishing substance of the greenies pronouncements.